Total Quality Management

1.0 Quality Management

Quality management started to surface during 1920s and focus on the final products. Product quality control was determined through inspections and statistical theory was applied. During 1940s, the quality management brought forth by industry experts like Juran and Deming. Japan employed them and soon set new standards in quality management causes the beginning of total quality management (TQM) (Weckenmann, Akkasoglu and Werner, 2015).

1.1 Product Quality Orientation

The first paradigm was noticed during the period of mass production, the customers’ needs were hardly considered by ensuring the amount of delivered products were sufficient and the specifications were met to avoid customers’ complaints. To achieve this, the final products were inspected and wastes were filtered. Capacious inspections resulted high costs, high waste rate and time consuming as many productions need to be first complete and redone correctly later.  To reduce costs, mass production focused with high product quality and less product variety. The inspection process can evolved at the beginning or during the manufacturing stage. The market competition was marked to provide excessive quality products with low costs and fast delivery time. However, increasing economic pressure and customers’ demands causes the first paradigm shift from quality focus to how to fulfill the high quality, low production cost and low delivery time efficiently.

1.2 Process Quality Orientation

Under increasing economic pressure, manufacturing process take into consideration of controlling and optimizing the process, quality, costs and time should be positively involved simultaneously. The whole process focus indicates that finding errors and eliminate that is more efficient than correction. This results it to control quality and replaced the idea of filtering out wastes with control circle. Strategy like 7 tools of QM arises to support the errors recognition and correction. Statistical Process Control (SPC) was wide-spread used to determine the causes of defect and avoid production wastes. Quality assurance was developed by identifying and defending risks and problems which occur at the root source. The activities of quality assurance consider the whole product’s process instead of the production only. Change from reactive control to preventive assurance, number-based data was implemented in statistical methods to overcome the demand for reliable (Lorente, 2016).